Best known for his studies of the American novel, Leslie A. Fiedler brings a distinctive mixture of psychological, political, and sociological concerns to bear on the description and analysis of American culture. Fiedler persistently locates himself...

The roster of "great critics and historians of American literature in this century," the New York Times Book Review once announced, "would have to include Leslie [Aaron] Fiedler, by far the least academic, [and] the most voluble, diverse, uneven,...

00-00-0000 Leslie Fiedler, literary critic, at 85 -- Provocative American voice By BEN DOBBIN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Date: 01-31-2003, Friday Section: LOCAL Edtion: All Editions.=.Two Star B. Two Star P. One Star B Biographical: LESLIE FIEDLER Leslie Fiedler, an author and literary...

Leslie Fiedler, 85, a provocative author and literary critic who wrote volumes of essays, short stories and poetry, died Jan. 29 after collapsing at his home in Buffalo. He had Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer. Only days ago, he dictated four pages of...

As far as I can determine, 2004 seems to be neither the best nor the worst year for movies, at least as far as the proportion of good (low, as always) to bad (high, as always) is concerned. Of course, the technology keeps changing-often to...

By the time I sat down for a studio screening of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, I was braced by all the advance hype from Venice and Toronto, as well as the local showbiz columns and media outlets, for the supposed shock of two men in...

Aggressive, cocksure, intellectually sadistic, dogmatic, gossipy, and more keenly involved with contemporary America than probably any of his critical peers, Professor Leslie Fiedler … has written [Waiting for the End], a justly bitter book that withholds neither his derisive intelligence nor his superior independence. Misleadingly subtitled "a new work on the crisis in American culture, race and sex," and sub-subtitled "a portrait of 20th-century American literature and its writ...

Leslie Fiedler is one of those literary personalities who has the effect of polarizing his readers. Already his new study of American Western mythology [The Return of the Vanishing American] has agitated the spleen of Kenneth Rexroth, who resents a New York Jew's tampering with the Western myth [see excerpt above]. Whether such romantic antagonism is just (Fiedler lived for many years in Missoula, Montana) isn't important, but it does present the kind of difficulty such a study as this must fa...

[The Stranger in Shakespeare] can be read in two quite distinct ways. The book may be regarded as epiphenomenal, an outgrowth of his previous theories, assumptions and fixations about American literature, extended back into the Elizabethan past. In other words, it might serve as little more than a rag with which to wipe the ankles of our greatest literary monument. On the other hand, it could be read as the author's most important critical statement, a bold book about the boldest of artists, in which...